American Sniper may not have come out of Oscar weekend with any of the top prizes, but it did come away with a new cumulative box office of more than $320 million. That's by far the highest of any war film in history, not to mention more than all the other Oscar Best Picture nominees combined.

What's a hero? Odysseus is one of the most famous heroes in literature and the complexity of his return might be said to be a metaphor for the perils of the calling. As you may recall when Odysseus returns, he's only recognized by his dog Argos.

Halloween, with its blood and gore, witches and werewolves, is a children's holiday because its horrors are fictional. Republicans have picked up on that theme for their Halloween fear-mongering. Fabricating characters and events to induce terror is just part of the GOP-Halloween scheme.

Our base for the weekend's festivities was the Bacara Resort and Spa on the Gaviota Coast. This spectacular shoreline, the largest south-facing stretch of sand on the American Pacific, is one of the last remaining intact coastal Mediterranean ecosystems in California.

It wasn't a big weekend in movies except for the stunning if a tad overrated Gravity, but two noteworthy political figures had prominent roles. Unfortunately for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, it didn't prove to be a big box office weekend for either.

I love St. Patrick's Day. It's so inclusive. By that I mean that though it's a bona fide religious holiday, you don't need to be particularly pious to enjoy it. Wishing everyone a safe and (reasonably) responsible holiday, I present my own candidates for the top drinking movies of all time.

It's never easy to make a movie, much less one not geared toward the masses. Here's a rundown of new movies, documentaries, TV shows and classics getting a reissue, including one of my all-time favorite romantic dramas on BluRay.

In anticipation of 12/21/12, this past year saw a return of the doomsday film. Melancholia was an okay end-of-the-world movie, but for this fan, it was not a very good Lars Von Trier film. Perhaps a third viewing is in order.

I now write about our American wars without ever having visited a war zone. There, in the '50s and early '60s, I advanced with the marines and the Russians, bombed Tokyo but also experienced (however briefly) Hiroshima after it was atomized.